Attendance for Baltimore City students transitioning from incarceration to school will be electronically monitored by the Department of Juvenile Services under a new partnership with the school system.
Case managers with the department will receive real-time updates through their computers if the students they are responsible for fail to attend school that day, so they can work with the school system to locate the teenagers and bring them back to class, said department Secretary Donald DeVore.
More than 2,000 teenagers are on probation in the city, but it is unclear how many are in school, department officials said.
“We can’t be passive waiting for them to come to us; we need to go to them,” said Andres Alonso, chief executive officer of the city school system. “The name of the job, before doing anything else, is making sure the kids are in classrooms.”
The program, announced Tuesday at Patterson High School, comes days after Alonso directed high-school principals to find, contact and bring back about 925 students who since January have dropped out.
In addition, the juvenile justice agency is expanding its Spotlight on Schools program, which assigns case managers to schools so each day they can interact and influence students. The program has case managers in six city schools, but new workers are being trained to enter 10 more where chronic truancy is a problem, DeVore said.
“It’s the idea of having our caseworkers in the schools where they belong,” DeVore said. “It shouldn’t be a novel idea, but it is in Maryland.”
When students are set to return to school, DeVore’s department will tell school officials, Alonso said, giving them time to hold an attendance hearing to determine which school is appropriate.
Alonso has made it a point to create more options for students. This year, eight new transformation and alternative schools opened, eliminating the difficult transition between middle and high school.
“Our efforts are not punitive,” said Jonathan Brice, director of the city schools’ student support services. “This is not a ‘gotcha’ for students and parents.”
Alonso, who has been with the school system for more than a year, said privacy concerns may have kept the school system and juvenile department from working together in the past.
He said that when he first met DeVore, he asked him: “How is it possible that we’re not sharing information? How is it possible that we’re not targeting a certain number of schools? How is it possible that we’re not targeting the kids in the shallow end rather than waiting until they get into the deep end?”
